One popular feature now offered by many computing systems, and particularly mobile computing systems, is Point-to-Point data transfer.
Using Point-to-Point data transfer applications a first party can use a first party computing system to transfer funds/payments; image data; video data; audio data; text data; calendar data, and numerous other forms of data to one or more other, or “second”, parties' computing systems, and/or network locations.
While incredibly convenient, Point-to-Point data transfer applications have a significant drawback in that in order to affect a data transfer from a first party to a second “contact” party, the first party must identify and designate the second party to the Point-to-Point data transfer application and provide contact data for the second party to the Point-to-Point data transfer application, typically a phone number, e-mail address, account data, or other contact data associated with the second party's computing system or accounts.
Currently, the first party designates the second party and provides contact data for the second party by one of two methods. If the second party is a new “contact” party, the first party must typically manually enter data indicating the identification of the second party and the second party's contact data into the Point-to-Point data transfer application through the first party computing system. This is often a difficult and time consuming task, particularly when the first party computing system is a mobile computing system with a typically limited screen and data entry capability.
In other cases, where the second party is a “known” contact entity, the second party's contact data may already exist and be accessible by the first party computing system and/or the Point-to-Point data transfer application. However, even in these cases, the first party must still identify the second party, typically via data entry in the form of manual character entry of data indicating the second party's identification, or, at best, by selecting the second party's identification from a pull down menu or listing. Again, this can be a difficult and time consuming task, particularly when the first party computing system is a mobile computing system with a typically limited screen and data entry capability.
In a mobile computing system dominated world, one of the most important goals is to minimize, or eliminate, manual data entry and to “auto-fill” as much required data as possible without requiring significant manual user data entry. As discussed above, currently available data transfer applications fail to meet this goal by requiring the first party to largely manually enter a second party's contact data in order to affect a data transfer. Consequently, currently available data transfer applications are not ideally optimized for today's computing environment.
What is needed is a method and system that allows a second party to be identified without significant data entry and for contact data associated with the identified second party to be obtained and provided to an application on a first party computing system with little or no manual first party data entry.